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When the time comes to expand your retail business, how will you
know? Some shop owners decide purely on gut feeling. Some people
decide based on excess cash-flow. Forward-thinking retailers
decide because they see the signs in the data.

As cloud technology has become affordable and accessible to small
retailers, now they can take advantage of store data - like
foot-traffic converting into sales - that illuminates
opportunities for growth from one store to many.

But data isn’t just a way of making big decisions like whether or
not it’s time to open a new store. Data is your growth medium
from the first day you decide to start up a retail business. It’s
the stuff
the future’s made of.

However, you don’t need big data to do something useful. All you
need is a collection of your own “small data,” used wisely. Here
are four types of data you’ll learn to love if you want to build
a successful retail business:

1. In-store presence data. With the right
technology, you can measure everything from foot traffic to in-store dwell time to the
areas most visited on the shop floor. Integrate that
information with your point-of-sale data and customer data to
understand how people shop, including conversion rates and
market segment behavior variations.

For example, If checkout times are long and abandonment is high,
then you know you need to speed up the checkout process or staff
up during peak hours. If customers linger longer in the footwear
aisles then the lingerie department, but buy more lingerie than
footwear, you may want to investigate their reasons and rethink
how you are using your space.

2. Inventory data. If you peek inside your
customers’ shopping baskets, you can learn a lot about what they
are buying most. Comparing that to your inventory and cost of
goods sold will help you tweak your retail operations to
encourage growth. Seasonal fluctuations in purchases and items
bought can help you determine when to create new advertising,
in-store layouts, web pages or special offers.

San Francisco-based handmade tea retailer, T-We Tea, used inventory data about the
cost of goods sold to identify which of their best-selling
teas had the highest margins.

In order to maximize profits, T-We purchased higher volumes of
those teas in order to increase economies of scale. From there,
T-We was able to bundle their most popular products together with
those same highest margin products, sell at a discounted rate,
but still increase profits. These simple but important tweaks
grew revenues by 300 percent and helped them expand to a larger
location.

3. Financial data. Financial data is vital to
learning how your cash flow and profits are doing and what
patterns they tend to follow. There are plenty of tools on the
market that can do this for you, at little to no cost (No need to
hire an expensive accountant to tell you how you are doing).

Plug your POS system into your accounts so you take control of
your day-to-day business finances. Services such as QuickBooks
Online integrate with POS systems, allowing you to automatically
capture real-time financial data and run analytical reports that
give you deep insight your business and let you forecast for
growth.

4. Customer data. Customer insight helps you
grow your brand’s influence and appeal. If you want loyal
customers to make repeat purchases and recommend your store to
their friends, then you need to listen to your customer data.

Working with a company like PayPal, retailers can empower their
customers to “check-in” when they arrive, showing the retailer
the customer’s photo and buying history. With this kind of
insight, you can personalize the customer experience based on
their purchase history.

These four pillars of data are key to understanding the
performance of your company. When you can see what’s going right
and what’s going wrong, you’ll make smarter decisions that steer
the company in the right direction, creating net improvement all
the time.